FACTUM

"Fascinating sense of instrumentation and undissectable movement: hypnotic and dreamlike until a pitch of physical and sonic intensity forces you to look around the audience to see who is going to crack...a captivating work which really challenges the boundaries of the observer’s consciousness."Prof. Eugene Douglas, Dept. Theater/Dance, University of New Mexico.

Touched by the work of photographer Francesca Woodman and the essay of Roland Barthes "CameraLucida" four artists explore the “entre-deux” of the still photographic image and the moving image of thedancer on stage. Shifting from the body to its representation and back again, in the displacement of onemedium to another, a recurring gesture from the outside to the inside, we discover a delicate territorywhere the image reveals itself in that which is disappearing.

We investigate the human presence: its evanescence and enduring after-image (im)possible to capture inside the photo. We wish to confront the image and its double, to expose the traces of an action, to sense a presence remaining despite absence. We seek a liminal passage. A membrane which separates two existences.

CONTRE-IMAGE was created during a series of artistic residencies at Plateau de la Danse of the Opera Theatre of Saint-Etienne in 2008; at MICADANSE, Paris in January 2009; at CCN of Rillieux-la-Pape/Compagnie Maguy Marin in February 2009 and at l’Atelier de Paris, Carolyn Carlson in December 2008 and June 2009. CONTRE-IMAGE premiered in the festival “Nous N’irons Pas à Avignon,” Vitry-sur-Seine, in July 2009.

Dancers/choreographers Ephia Gburek, Yael KaravanLive music by Benoit Cancoin Film and voice by Céline Pierre

MIRRORMINDED CURIOUSITEASE

Mirrorminded Curiositease physicalizes through the body, sound, and video projection the themes prevalent in Finnegan’s Wake, and in the lives of James and Lucia Joyce. The dancer herself is the screen for the projection: flesh washed over by image. The body drowns in the nocturnal pools of the unconscious. She dreams, tossed from one stream of thought to another, soaked through by sound-flows of unknown languages. She rises, gasping, to the mirrory surface, only to sink even deeper into the waters of sleep…Play of shadow and light, tenderness and taboo between father poet and daughter muse. Blindness, desire, a contracting black sun, or the rapidly dilating pupil. Sensitive ears of the sleepwalker become “the eyes of obscurity” and the nose a compass seeking the beloved. Two tree-filled horizons form a river which swallows the dancer. The goliath text of Finnegans Wake gives birth to a sonic environment as Joyce’s “hundredletter thunderwords” are spoken by a computer using the vocal patterns of different languages; they resound and resemble the roaring of beasts and oceans.

MMC premiered on April 25, 2006 at Galerie Rachel Haferkamp, Köln, and then played at Theater Kapelle in Berlin. In 2007, MMC was shown at Espace 44 in Lyon and at La Menuiserie in Rodez with the support of Conseil Général de L’Aveyron. In 2008, it was presented in Potsdam at UNIDRAM 15 festival.

(MYOPIA)2

(MYOPIA)2 A nearly-blind schoolgirl, bespectacled. Dreaming through a haze of myopia, she runs into herself, her skin seeing more than her eyes. She is most certainly teetering on the awkward verge of puberty... when everything is lost: split in two. There is no teacher, no correction. Only the immediate reflections of primitive ghosts and autonomic machines seeking the (dis)equilibrium of an unseeable future. (MYOPIA)2 Addresses the notion of seeing and being seen. Who is the viewer and who is being viewed? In a nearly blind world, all sounds enter the sphere of perception, stirrings of actors and audience alike. (MYOPIA)2 Unable to focus on the lesson at hand, a turbulent body undergoing metamorphosis scrawls quivering lines of Quatsch across the chalkboards, traversing the dangerous territory between madness and pure creativity, stigma and individuality. (MYOPIA)2 Her body refuses to conform, its burgeoning sexuality, awkward and feverish, has more in common with the mating practices of insects. At the schizophrenic onset of puberty, the myopic girl is replicated in an endlessly expanded moment. She bends too far and her double appears.Performed 2005-2006 in Berlin at KuLe ArtHouse, Hau 3, and GAYA-Karmanoia Theater; in Amsterdam at Overtoom 301; in Potsdam at UNIDRAM 13. Festival fuer junges Theater in Europa; and in Holstebro, Denmark @ ODIN Teatret;in Lyon at Le Croiseur; and in Saint Affrique at Le Petit Carré D'Art.

unsound body and voice: ephia and ana kavalis

auditory hallucinations: jeff gburek (lap-top/prepared guitar)

Ci-Gît: six pregnancies for Antonin Artaud

"Ci-Gît" is based in part on the banned 1948 radio-broadcast of Antonin Artaud’s "To Have Done With The Judgement Of God." Artaud's original recording has been digitally stretched, spliced and manipulated by Jeff Gburek. The new treatment of the text, supplemented by prepared guitar and diverse organic & electronic sources, renders a sonological universe from Artaud's vocables, a womb from which the unsound body will be forced to slither. Dancer Ephia explores the feminine elements of Artaud’s personality which emanated during his electro-shock therapy and came to be called "the unborn daughters of my heart". These semi-fictional daughter/lover/warrior/liberator-s, these innocent and filthy girls endure great hardships in their attempts to liberate their lover/father. Neneka is the youngest daughter, and simultaneously the oldest, as this was also the name of Artaud's Turkish grandmother. Neneka is a fetal kitten slipped from the womb too soon, a formless body and dripping caul, a smudge. She is discovered in "the puddle state of electro-shock," a terrifying place of trembling void.

The extensive research for "Ci-Gît" took Djalma to Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara in October 2003. Artaud visited the Tarahumara Indians in the 1930’s seeking to learn about the visionary experiences of those who "eat right out of the earth the delirium that gave birth to them" and whose vigorously physical spirituality Artaud thought offered a remedy to Western technological decadence. The first version of the work, entitled "wife, life, tripe, damnit and THAT," premiered April 2004 in Austin, TX at a welder's studio; next in Birmingham, AL at the site of an old slaughter house; in New Orleans, LA at the site of a former brothel; in Phoenix, AZ at Teatro Caliente Festival. In the year 2005 this work was performed in Europe under the title: "Ci-Gît: six pregnancies for Antonin Artaud" at ODIN Teatret; Les Explorateurs Associés Festival; Les Voutes, Paris; Espace Antonin Artaud--Rodez, in the asylum chapel where Artaud attended mass; further presentations in Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New York City, and San Fransisco.

dying breath: explorations at the threshold

death and the waiting room/ moments of departure (spark) memories of synaptic decay/ the (subtraction) of a limb, the irreversible sound of wooden ornaments, tightening at the knot/ as you watch the wood bend until there are knees/ as the image fills the sticky likelihood of the frame (mouthing)/ the meeting of surfaces (of metal to metal, of sound to eardrum, sound/light to skin, skin/light to eye, eye to inner eye of brain, perception to memory) is primarily erotic and death/ this is also birth/ resist it, if you can… you are on your own/you are on repeat.

ASYLUM: a study of place and ghost.

A trans-media installation reflecting on the poetics of abandonment. Dancer Ephia, experimental musician Jeff Gburek, video artist Ben Walsh, and photographer Yekaterina Yushmanova have been conducting physical research in New Mexico's abandoned institutions for over a year. Entering into the dilapidated architectures of old mental institutions, facilities for the developmentally disabled, homes for the elderly, correctional institutions, they ask how does a place enter into the body? Although defunct, these places are far from empty. Taking on the roles of archeologists and accidental trespassers, they encounter decomposing wheelchairs, overflowing file cabinets, singed drawings, a storehouse of surgical gloves, mimeograph schedules, and defaced murals, wandering themselves as ghosts, seeking to understand the experience of those who had been shoved to the far periphery of their society's vision.

Tracing the evolution of architectural interiorities as mirror of social relations; annotations on the isolation of atypical people & the creation of ghost-spaces echoing on the margins of history...

Djalma Primordial Science focuses on three specific sites: Los Lunas, a defunct institution for those with mental and developmental disabilities which awaits its next incarnation; Fort Stanton, which has evolved from military outpost to a tuberculosis clinic to WWII internment camp to a home for the developmentally disabled to a women's penitentiary, now used as a rehab center; and Sandia Ranch, a privately run sanitorium turned home for the elderly turned illicit drug-drop & hideout for criminals, which is soon to be demolished. They seek to bring the immediate potency of the asylum sites to the viewer-- a potency that is clearly physical. The project consists of a photo exhibit, video installation, plus an hour-long performance for body, sound, and video. Realized in Albuquerque, NM at SOL ARTS, AUGUST 27, 28, 29, 2004.

Naufragio Ballante (The Dancing Shipwreck)

A 12 hour site-specific performance at THE LAND/ an art site, Inc. October 6, 2002. Dawn until darkness without interruption.

We have been living inside our works rather than exposing them. This is why we are inside and skirted around a ditch that is rather an impression given by the earth of a watery vehicular energy. Shored up against it the wall of displaced earth that human and machinic hands layed there. A shipwreck doesn’t dance literally, moved however by the undercurrents swaying its bulk and skeletal appendages. The dance is in the moment it was frozen like a fossil in the mind at the peak of its violent death.

The sound for this performance could stem from a bio-environmental feedback loop, a kind of puppet tied to the aeolian gravity of a rusty mobile, a puppet already alive, one that turns to face the puppet master, but also one that does not challenge, one that accepts the judgement of winds and thinks of itself as more of a dissenting wind in a supreme court of winds, a crumbling down of the puppet body into the earth transmitting dissolving sparks.